industryterm:advertising revenue

Opinion | The Fake Nancy Pelosi Video Hijacked Our Attention. Just as Intended. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/26/opinion/nancy-pelosi-video-facebook.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2019/05/26/opinion/26warzel/26warzel-facebookJumbo.jpg

Last week, a series of manipulated videos — subtly slowed down and then pitch-corrected to make it appear as if the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, was drunk or incapacitated — were published across Facebook and other social networks, including YouTube and Twitter.

The swift spread of agitation propaganda and the creep of hyperpartisanship across social media isn’t a bug, it is a feature.

The videos were viewed millions of times. They were shared by the president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani (the tweet was later deleted) as well as dozens of supporters in the pro-Trump media. The president didn’t share the agitprop, but he did bang out a tweet questioning the speaker’s well-being.

Mainstream media outlets, in an effort to debunk the viral clips, linked to the video or reposted portions of it themselves, side-by-side with the un-doctored footage of the House speaker. YouTube removed the video, but only after it amassed thousands of views. Twitter and Facebook did not remove the video (Facebook eventually added “fact check” links to the clips). Journalists and pundits debated the social networks’ decisions to leave the video up, while others lamented the rise of political misinformation, filter bubbles, the future of “deepfake” videos and the internet’s penchant to warp reality.

Whether repeating the lie or attempting to knock it down, the dominant political narrative of the past two days has focused squarely on Speaker Pelosi’s health. And the video views continue to climb. Our attention was been successfully hijacked by a remedial iMovie trick.

It’s easy to fall back on the notion that the Pelosi viral videos are an example of a broken system. But that’s not exactly true. Many of the forces that led this particular doctored video to become news are part of an efficient machine designed to do exactly this. Our media distribution systems are working just as intended. They just weren’t designed for our current political moment.

This disconnect between the platform ideal and the platform reality is why Facebook’s rules are arbitrarily enforced. It’s why Facebook’s fact-checking system doesn’t take effect until it’s too late and a piece of content has achieved massive distribution. And it’s why the company struggles to articulate whether it’s a platform or a media company or something else entirely. Facebook, by virtue of the fact that it made $16.6 billion in advertising revenue last quarter, is a media company. But Facebook wasn’t designed to be a media company, especially not one in the middle of an information war. As a platform, Facebook has no real responsibility for the veracity of its content; as a media company, it most certainly does.

Similarly, the press has few answers for how to cover propaganda in an online ecosystem that is designed to spread hoaxes. The heart of the reporting process breaks down when your adversaries’ only goal is to hijack attention.

#Fake_News #Facebook #Médias #Journalisme #Nancy_Pelosi

Decentralizing Social Media Rewards: Steem and #snax comparison
▻https://hackernoon.com/decentralizing-social-media-rewards-steem-and-snax-comparison-ac17201824

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*PwppgY-nHUM7UvdyHD8_hw.png

Rewarding social influencersIf a lot of people enjoy your content and listen to you, you should be able to monetize this achievement. There are, however, multiple problems that creators across platforms face when trying to monetize their success.These problems are:You have to rely on advertising revenue or on donations.Platforms that provide ad sharing take a large cut from the ad revenue, with Youtube and Twitch taking half of any money generated by your content.Tight control exerted by the platforms over who gets to participate in their partnership programs resulting in censorship and favoritism.If you find a new platform with better monetization, you have to move your followers there or grow a new audience from that platform community.Cryptocurrency can solve those problems. In this (...)

#steemit #social-media #cryptocurrency #blockchain

Nudge causes #facebook shares to drop by more than 20%
▻https://hackernoon.com/nudge-causes-facebook-shares-to-drop-by-more-than-20-2b28572c342d?source

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*U6teeq24T4J4pZF_UYuinQ.png

Shares in social networking giant Facebook dropped by a staggering 24% overnight after the revelation that huge numbers of users are deleting their News Feeds using a Chrome extension called Nudge.The Chrome extension, which lets users get rid of the highly-addictive News Feed across all platforms while retaining the useful parts of Facebook, dramatically reduces the amount of advertising revenue that Facebook can make off its users, since they no longer see targeted adverts — or indeed anything at all — on their Facebook home page.It’s thought that thousands of Facebook users are flocking to the Delete Your News Feed feature in order to take back control of how they use the social network. Analysts have been scrambling to redo their financial models for a world where users do not endlessly (...)

#nudge-causes-facebook #fb #facebook-share-price #social-media

’Fiction is outperforming reality’: how YouTube’s algorithm distorts truth | Technology | The Guardian
►https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/02/how-youtubes-algorithm-distorts-truth

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/6ca9c73956bff72fb83f27568e97c88053b36879/0_384_5760_3456/master/5760.jpg?w=1200&h=630&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=crop&crop=faces%2Centropy&bm=normal&ba=bottom%2Cleft&blend64=aHR0cHM6Ly91cGxvYWRzLmd1aW0uY28udWsvMjAxOC8wMS8zMS9mYWNlYm9va19kZWZhdWx0LnBuZw&s=083cd38b1e317eb1a0ed52bcde1ee065

There are 1.5 billion YouTube users in the world, which is more than the number of households that own televisions. What they watch is shaped by this algorithm, which skims and ranks billions of videos to identify 20 “up next” clips that are both relevant to a previous video and most likely, statistically speaking, to keep a person hooked on their screen.

Company insiders tell me the algorithm is the single most important engine of YouTube’s growth. In one of the few public explanations of how the formula works – an academic paper that sketches the algorithm’s deep neural networks, crunching a vast pool of data about videos and the people who watch them – YouTube engineers describe it as one of the “largest scale and most sophisticated industrial recommendation systems in existence”.

Lewd and violent videos have been algorithmically served up to toddlers watching YouTube Kids, a dedicated app for children. One YouTube creator who was banned from making advertising revenues from his strange videos – which featured his children receiving flu shots, removing earwax, and crying over dead pets – told a reporter he had only been responding to the demands of Google’s algorithm. “That’s what got us out there and popular,” he said. “We learned to fuel it and do whatever it took to please the algorithm.”

During the three years he worked at Google, he was placed for several months with a team of YouTube engineers working on the recommendation system. The experience led him to conclude that the priorities YouTube gives its algorithms are dangerously skewed.

“YouTube is something that looks like reality, but it is distorted to make you spend more time online,” he tells me when we meet in Berkeley, California. “The recommendation algorithm is not optimising for what is truthful, or balanced, or healthy for democracy.”

Chaslot explains that the algorithm never stays the same. It is constantly changing the weight it gives to different signals: the viewing patterns of a user, for example, or the length of time a video is watched before someone clicks away.

The engineers he worked with were responsible for continuously experimenting with new formulas that would increase advertising revenues by extending the amount of time people watched videos. “Watch time was the priority,” he recalls. “Everything else was considered a distraction.”

The software Chaslot wrote was designed to provide the world’s first window into YouTube’s opaque recommendation engine. The program simulates the behaviour of a user who starts on one video and then follows the chain of recommended videos – much as I did after watching the Logan Paul video – tracking data along the way.

It finds videos through a word search, selecting a “seed” video to begin with, and recording several layers of videos that YouTube recommends in the “up next” column. It does so with no viewing history, ensuring the videos being detected are YouTube’s generic recommendations, rather than videos personalised to a user. And it repeats the process thousands of times, accumulating layers of data about YouTube recommendations to build up a picture of the algorithm’s preferences.

Over the last 18 months, Chaslot has used the program to explore bias in YouTube content promoted during the French, British and German elections, global warming and mass shootings, and published his findings on his website, Algotransparency.com. Each study finds something different, but the research suggests YouTube systematically amplifies videos that are divisive, sensational and conspiratorial.

It was not a comprehensive set of videos and it may not have been a perfectly representative sample. But it was, Chaslot said, a previously unseen dataset of what YouTube was recommending to people interested in content about the candidates – one snapshot, in other words, of the algorithm’s preferences.

Jonathan Albright, research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, who reviewed the code used by Chaslot, says it is a relatively straightforward piece of software and a reputable methodology. “This research captured the apparent direction of YouTube’s political ecosystem,” he says. “That has not been done before.”

I spent weeks watching, sorting and categorising the trove of videos with Erin McCormick, an investigative reporter and expert in database analysis. From the start, we were stunned by how many extreme and conspiratorial videos had been recommended, and the fact that almost all of them appeared to be directed against Clinton.

Some of the videos YouTube was recommending were the sort we had expected to see: broadcasts of presidential debates, TV news clips, Saturday Night Live sketches. There were also videos of speeches by the two candidates – although, we found, the database contained far more YouTube-recommended speeches by Trump than Clinton.

But what was most compelling was how often Chaslot’s software detected anti-Clinton conspiracy videos appearing “up next” beside other videos.

Tufekci, the sociologist who several months ago warned about the impact YouTube may have had on the election, tells me YouTube’s recommendation system has probably figured out that edgy and hateful content is engaging. “This is a bit like an autopilot cafeteria in a school that has figured out children have sweet teeth, and also like fatty and salty foods,” she says. “So you make a line offering such food, automatically loading the next plate as soon as the bag of chips or candy in front of the young person has been consumed.”

Once that gets normalised, however, what is fractionally more edgy or bizarre becomes, Tufekci says, novel and interesting. “So the food gets higher and higher in sugar, fat and salt – natural human cravings – while the videos recommended and auto-played by YouTube get more and more bizarre or hateful.”

But why would a bias toward ever more weird or divisive videos benefit one candidate over another? That depends on the candidates. Trump’s campaign was nothing if not weird and divisive. Tufekci points to studies showing that “field of misinformation” largely tilted anti-Clinton before the election. “Fake news providers,” she says, “found that fake anti-Clinton material played much better with the pro-Trump base than did fake anti-Trump material with the pro-Clinton base.”

She adds: “The question before us is the ethics of leading people down hateful rabbit holes full of misinformation and lies at scale just because it works to increase the time people spend on the site – and it does work.”

About half the videos Chaslot’s program detected being recommended during the election have now vanished from YouTube – many of them taken down by their creators. Chaslot has always thought this suspicious. These were videos with titles such as “Must Watch!! Hillary Clinton tried to ban this video”, watched millions of times before they disappeared. “Why would someone take down a video that has been viewed millions of times?” he asks.

I contacted Franchi to see who was right. He sent me screen grabs of the private data given to people who upload YouTube videos, including a breakdown of how their audiences found their clips. The largest source of traffic to the Bill Clinton rape video, which was viewed 2.4m times in the month leading up to the election, was YouTube recommendations.

The same was true of all but one of the videos Franchi sent me data for. A typical example was a Next News Network video entitled “WHOA! HILLARY THINKS CAMERA’S OFF… SENDS SHOCK MESSAGE TO TRUMP” in which Franchi, pointing to a tiny movement of Clinton’s lips during a TV debate, claims she says “fuck you” to her presidential rival. The data Franchi shared revealed in the month leading up to the election, 73% of the traffic to the video – amounting to 1.2m of its views – was due to YouTube recommendations. External traffic accounted for only 3% of the views.

Franchi is a professional who makes a living from his channel, but many of the other creators of anti-Clinton videos I spoke to were amateur sleuths or part-time conspiracy theorists. Typically, they might receive a few hundred views on their videos, so they were shocked when their anti-Clinton videos started to receive millions of views, as if they were being pushed by an invisible force.

In every case, the largest source of traffic – the invisible force – came from the clips appearing in the “up next” column.

#YouTube #Algorithme_recommendation #Politique_USA #Elections #Fake_news

#Moral outrage in the #digital age | Nature Human Behaviour
▻https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0213-3

https://media.springernature.com/m685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41562-017-0213-3/MediaObjects/41562_2017_213_Fig1_HTML.jpg

Before the #internet existed, gossip served a purpose of spreading news about who could be trusted within local social networks4. By this logic, information should be shared as a function of its ability to reinforce trust and cooperation within the community. But online platforms have profoundly changed the incentives of information sharing. Because they compete for our attention to generate advertising revenue, their algorithms promote content that is most likely to be shared, regardless of whether it benefits those who share it — or is even true.

Research on virality shows that people are more likely to share content that elicits moral emotions such as outrage5. Because outrageous content generates more revenue through viral sharing, natural selection-like forces may favour ‘supernormal’ stimuli that trigger much stronger outrage responses than do transgressions we typically encounter in everyday life. Supporting this hypothesis, there is evidence that immoral acts encountered online incite stronger moral outrage than immoral acts encountered in person or via traditional forms of media (Fig. 2b).

[...]

Digital media might alter the subjective experience of outrage in several ways. By increasing the frequency and extremity of triggering stimuli, one possible long-term consequence of digital media is ‘outrage fatigue’: constant exposure to outrageous news could diminish the overall intensity of outrage experiences, or cause people to experience outrage more selectively to reduce emotional and attentional demands. On the other hand, studies have shown that venting anger begets more anger6. If digital media makes it easier to express outrage, this could intensify subsequent experiences of outrage. Future research is necessary to resolve these possibilities.

#indignation #numérique

The secret lives of Google raters | Ars Technica
▻https://arstechnica.com/features/2017/04/the-secret-lives-of-google-raters

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/officecrowdfire-640x360.jpg

Who are these raters? They’re carefully trained and tested staff who can spend 40 hours per week logged into a system called Raterhub, which is owned and operated by Google. Every day, the raters complete dozens of short but exacting tasks that produce invaluable data about the usefulness of Google’s ever-changing algorithms. They contribute significantly to several Google and Android projects, from search and voice recognition to photos and personalization features.

Few people realize how much these raters contribute to the smooth functioning act we call “Googling.” Even #Google engineers who work with rater data don’t know who these people are. But some raters would now like that to change. That’s because, earlier this month, thousands of them received an e-mail that said their hours would be cut in half, partly due to changes in Google’s staffing policies.

Though Google boasts about its army of raters, the raters are not Google employees. Instead, they are employed by firms who have contracted them to Google, full time, for years on end. These raters believe that Google has reaped significant benefits from their labor without ensuring their jobs are secure and stable. That’s why 10 raters came to Ars Technica to tell the story of what their lives are really like.

Du #digital_labor derrière les requêtes Google (et de la politique salariale de cette dernière)

The Platform Press : How Silicon Valley reengineered #journalism - Columbia Journalism Review via @opironet
▻https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/platform-press-how-silicon-valley-reengineered-journalism.php

Avec une chronologie bien dense à la fin.

2000

October 23: Google AdWords launches.

2002

October 4—21: Harvard study finds 113 white nationalist, Nazi, anti-Semitic, and radical Islamic sites, and at least one fundamentalist Christian site, were removed from French and German Google listings.

2004

February 2: Facebook launches as a Harvard-only social network.

2006

January 23: Google News formally launches; had been in beta since September 2002.
January 25: Google launches Google.cn, adhering to China’s censorship policies until March 2010.
July 15: Twttr (later renamed Twitter) is released. “Tweets” can only be 140 characters.
September 5: Facebook News Feed launches and displays activity from a user’s network.
September 10: Google delists Inquisition21, a website seeking to challenge potentially incorrect child pornography convictions in the UK. Google implies the delisting is because Inquisition21 tried to manipulate search results.

2007

January 10: Facebook launches mobile site m.facebook.com.
April 16: Google’s Terms of Service unveiled, including provisions granting Google “perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which [users] submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”

2008

October 7: Apple launches iOS App Store.
October 22: Android OS Google Play store launches.
December 30: Facebook removes a photo of a mother breastfeeding babies, leading to protests.

2009

February 4: Facebook’s Terms of Service altered to remove the automatic expiry of Facebook’s license to use individuals’ names, likenesses, and images if an account was deleted.
February 24: WhatsApp, a mobile messaging app company, is founded, and the app is released in May of 2009.

2010

January 14: Links to Encyclopedia Dramatica’s “Aboriginal” article removed from Google after complaint; Google defended decision on grounds that the content represented a violation of Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act.
March 22: Google announces it will no longer adhere to Chinese censorship policies by redirecting Chinese users to its Hong Kong domain.
October 6: Instagram, a photo-based social network, is released.
October 21: News Corporation axes “Project Alesia,” a potential competitor to Google News, over concerns about cost and readiness of proposed partners.

2011

September 26: Snapchat, a mobile app for disappearing messages, is released.
October 12: iOS Apple Newsstand app to read a variety of publications is released.
November 2: Twitter begins to “curate” results on its timeline.

2012

February 16: Facebook’s internal “Abuse Standards” leaked, including policy to filter out content containing images of maps of Kurdistan and of burning Turkish flags.
March 1: Fundamental rewrite of Google’s Terms of Service, adding rights for Google to “use, host, [and] store” any content submitted by users.
April 9: Facebook buys Instagram for $1 billion.
May 31: Google launches a feature that informs Chinese users which keywords are censored. (The feature is removed in early December.)

2013

January 19: After backlash, Instagram scales back earlier announcement on changing Terms of Use to allow for selling user data.
June 20: Announcement that video is coming to Instagram
October 1: Canadian photographer Petra Collins’ Instagram account deleted because of a selfie which displayed visible pubic hair beneath her bikini bottom; challenged by Collins as it did not break Instagram’s terms.
October 3: Snapchat Stories, a compilation of “snaps” a user’s friends see, launches.
November 11: Update to Google’s Terms of Service, clarifying how profile name and photo might appear in Google products.
November 20: Android OS Google Play Newsstand app to read a variety of publications launches.

2014

January 30: Facebook launches Paper, an effort at personalized news, and Trending.
February 19: WhatsApp bought by Facebook for $19 billion.
April 1: Algorithm introduced on Instagram to tailor the “Explore”/“Popular” tab to each user.
April 14: Update to Google’s Terms of Service, including provision to automatically analyze content such as emails when content is sent, received, and stored.
April 24: Launch of Facebook Newswire, powered by Storyful. While it was eventually folded, it allowed publishers to embed “newsworthy” content from Facebook into own material, use platform for newsgathering and storytelling.
May 19: In Russia, Twitter blocks pro-Ukrainian accounts following threats to bar the service if it did not delete tweets violating Russian law.
May 30: Google launches tool that enables Europeans to request “right to be forgotten” in response to ruling by European Court of Justice.
June 13: Google ordered by Canadian court to remove search results that linked to websites of Datalink, which sold technology alleged to have been stolen from a competitor.
June 17: Snapchat Our Story, a public Story aggregating many users’ activity around an event launches.
June 23: Facebook News Feed algorithm altered to increase priority of video.
July 15: Geofilters on Snapchat are released.
July 25: Twitter blocks an account belonging to @boltai, a hacker collective that leaked internal Kremlin documents.
August 25: Facebook News Feed algorithm altered to reduce priority of clickbait.
October 22: German publishers concede defeat to Google in long-running dispute over attempt to charge license fees.
December 18: Google removes links to articles that criticized Australian organization Universal Medicine, an alleged cult.

2015

January 12: Instagram deletes account of Australian photo and fashion agency due to a photograph with pubic hair outside bikini bottoms. (Account reactivated January 21.)
January 20: Facebook News Feed algorithm altered to “show fewer hoaxes.”
January 21: WhatsApp Web launches.
January 27: Snapchat Discover launches. Selected publishers create a daily Discover channel, like a mini interactive magazine with an advertising revenue split arrangement where publishers can sell for 70 percent of revenue, or let Snapchat sell for 50 percent.
March 3: Instagram carousel ads launch.
March 9: Twitter acquires live streaming app Periscope.
March 31: Twitter rolls out Curator, which allows publishers to search and display tweets based on hashtags, keywords, location, and other specific details.
April 13: Snapchat gets rid of brand stories, also known as sponsored stories, after six months.
April 21: Facebook tweaks News Feed to emphasize family and friends because people are worried about “missing important updates.”
April 27: Snapchat hires Peter Hamby from CNN and announces plans to hire more journalists for the election.
April 27: Google announces Digital News Initiative with eight European publishers.
May 7: Facebook releases internal research on filter bubbles that finds “most people have friends who claim an opposing political ideology, and that the content in peoples’ News Feeds reflect those diverse views.”
May 7: Snapchat will charge advertisers 2 cents per view for ten second ads in between Discover slides (up to four slots) and during videos. This plan is called Two Pennies. It was previously 15 cents.
May 12: Facebook announces Instant Articles, faster loading articles on Facebook for iPhone,and original launch partners. Ads are embedded in article, and there is a 70/30 revenue share with publishers if Facebook sells the ad.
June 8: Apple News app announced to replace the Newsstand app. Like Facebook Instant Articles, a 70/30 revenue share with publishers if Apple sells ads against their content.
June 15: Facebook’s News Feed algorithm updated to prioritize time spent on a story above engagement.
June 22: Google News Lab announced to support technological collaborations with journalists.
June 23: Instagram changes Explore to allow users to follow real-time news more easily by sorting by location and recency.
July 1: Automatic bans imposed on Facebook accounts using an offensive slang term for Russians. Similar Russian insults towards Ukrainians (such as ‘hohol’) were not deleted.
July 27: Snapchat axes Yahoo! and Warner Music from Discover, replaces them with BuzzFeed and iHeartRadio.
Late July: Snapchat’s ad team starts selling against Discover.
August 5: Facebook Live video launches for public figures.
August 27: Snapchat Discover expands from 12 to 15 partners. In the past, they cut old partners to add new ones so all 12 fit on one screen.
September 9: Using the Facebook ad platform technology, Instagram’s advertising platform expands globally, allows for more targeting and ad format flexibility.
September 22: Facebook allows publishers to create Instant Articles in their own content management systems.
September 23: Facebook releases 360 video. Users can move their phones for a spherical view within a video.
October 6: Twitter Moments, curated tweets around top stories, launches.
October 7: Google announces Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project, which will allow publishers’ stories to load more quickly from search results.
October 21: Twitter announces partnerships with firms such as Spredfast, Wayin, Dataminr, ScribbleLive, and Flowics at its developer conference.
October 22: Google announces it has signed up over 120 news organizations for its Digital News Initiative, including the BBC, The Economist, and Der Spiegel.
October 27: Twitter announces it will discontinue video-sharing app Vine.
October 28: Snapchat Terms of Service updated: requests right to reproduce, modify, republish, and save users’ photos, specifically in relation to Live Stories.
October 29: Instagram allows businesses to use Facebook’s Ads Manager and to run campaigns across Facebook and Instagram.
October 31: Instagram conducts its first video curation for Halloween.
November 10: Instagram partner program launches; a group of 40 adtech, content marketing, and community management companies that work to help businesses on Instagram.
November 11: Facebook Notify, a real-time notification news app, is launched.
November 13: Snapchat launches Official Stories, Stories from verified brands or influencers.
November 23: Snapchat launches Story Explorer, which allows users to focus on a specific moment from a story, but from additional users and perspectives.
November 30: Snapchat allows publishers to deep link back to Snapchat content from elsewhere, like other social platforms.
December 3: Facebook releases Live video to the public.
December 9: Facebook tweaks News Feed so it works with poor connections, like 2G. Facebook also allows publishers to sell Instant Article ad campaigns instead of having to make those ads part of their own site package, to have one ad for every 350 words of an Instant Article (up from one ad per 500 words), and to control link outs at bottom of Instant Articles.
December 2: Snapchat makes a Story for live/breaking news during San Bernardino.
December 9: Google announces AMP rollout timeline; pages will go live in February.
December 15: German government strikes deal with outlets who agree to delete hate speech from their sites within 24 hours, in response to increasing racism online.

2016

January 5: Digiday reports that Snapchat, up to 23 Discover partners, is rumored to be building their own ad interface API, like Facebook, to target ads to users instead of publications.
January 11: Instagram publishes its first live video curation for the Golden Globes.
January 19: Nielsen expands Twitter TV Ratings to include Facebook conversations around TV shows, called Social Content Ratings.
January 21: Facebook opens Audience Optimization to publishers to target specific readers.
January 26: The Facebook Audience Network can be used by publishers to sell ads on their mobile sites.
January 26: Apple plans to make subscription-only content available in the News app; publishers can only post free articles or excerpts that drive people to subscribe.
January 27: Facebook reveals forthcoming “reactions” in the US, which had already been tested elsewhere in the world.
January 28: Facebook Live expands to all iPhone users.
January 28: Snapchat launches a show called “Good Luck America” with Peter Hamby.
February 4: WhatsApp increases group chat user limit to 256 people, aiming to increase enterprise appeal, including to publishers.
February 9: Google AMP announces solutions for subscription-supported publications, and Adobe Analytics integration.
February 10: Twitter changes algorithm to make sure users see tweets they are likely to care about.
February 10: On Instagram, publishers can now see video views and can do account switching. Instagram hits 200,000 advertisers, and 75 percent are outside of the US.
February 12: Reports that Snapchat will let users subscribe to Discover channels and that it will go from logo button to magazine cover look by May.
February 24: Google AMP articles go live.
February 25: Snapchat partners with Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings to measure, transparently, the effectiveness of ad campaigns.
February 26: Facebook Live rolled out to all Android users.
February 28: Snapchat Live Stories, beginning with the Oscars, will be viewable on the web for special occasions.
March 1: Facebook changes algorithm to prioritize Live Video, especially Live video that is broadcasting.
March 15: Instagram announces that starting in May users’ feeds will be algorithmically driven, instead of real-time.
March 15: Apple News app opens to all publishers.
March 24: On Facebook, publishers can see daily activity around a video.
March 29: Snapchat Terms of Service updated to add the potential to incorporate third-party links and search results in Snapchat services.
March 31: Facebook creates option for publishers to autoplay and non-autoplay video ads in Instant; can have pre-roll video ads in any editorial video; and can have one more ad unit at the base of articles.
April 5: Twitter announces live video deal to stream NFL games, and begins pushing for live video deals with publishers.
April 7: Facebook allows Live Video within groups and events, live reactions from viewers, live filters, the ability to watch live with friends, a live map, and also live video in trending and search.
April 8: Branded content will be allowed as Facebook Instant Articles with the sponsor tagged.
April 12: Facebook makes several announcements at F8 that are relevant to publishers: the Live video API will be open for publishers who want to experiment/innovate; Instant Articles is open to all publishers; publishers will be able to use messenger bots to distribute stories.
April 21: Facebook tweaks the algorithm to focus on articles people are likely to spend time viewing.
April 28: Twitter moves to the News category in the Apple app store.
May 9: Gizmodo reveals details that Facebook’s Trending Topics is actively curated by people who “suppressed” conservative news.
May 12: Facebook releases a 28-page internal document outlining guidelines for staff curating Trending Topics, in response to media reporting suggesting potential bias.
May 19: Instagram adds video to carousel ads.
May 23: Facebook’s general counsel responds to Congress Republicans concerned about bias with a letter; the previous week, Facebook’s legal team met with Chairman of the US Senate Commerce Committee John Thune.
May 24: Instagram adds media buying as fourth advertising partner category.
May 24: Facebook says it will revise the way it curates its Trending topics section, including no longer using external websites to validate a story’s importance.
May 24: Twitter announces changes to simplify Tweets including what counts toward your 140 characters, @names in replies and media attachments (like photos, GIFs, videos, and polls) will no longer “use up” valuable characters.
May 26: Facebook allows for their Audience Network to be used for ads to be seen off-Facebook, a move seen as competitive with Google.
June 2: Facebook Notify is shut down.
June 2: Google AMP launches in France, Germany, Italy, UK, Russia, and Mexico.
June 7: Google announces preliminary results from AMP showing that 80 percent of publishers are seeing higher viewability and 90 percent are seeing higher engagement.
Between June 6 and 12: Intel becomes the first brand to publish content directly to Instant Articles.
June 9: Facebook launches 360 photo. Users can move their phones for a spherical view within a photo.
June 16: Snapchat announces an online magazine called Real Life.
June 21: Twitter Engage launches, allowing for better insights and data. Also, the length of user video is increased from 30 to 140 seconds.
June 22: The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook has made deals worth more than $50 million with 140 video creators, including publishers, to use Live, since those partnerships were first announced in March.
June 29: Facebook’s algorithm changes to place further emphasis on family and friends and on creating a feed that will “inform” and “entertain.”
July 6: Snapchat introduces Memories.
July 14: Facebook Instant Articles can be posted to Messenger.
July 19: Google announces AMP for ads, to bring ads to the same load time as AMP articles.
July 11—12: Twitter announces multiple live video deals, including with CBS, Wimbledon, and Bloomberg.
August 2: Instagram Stories launches. A compilation of updates a user’s friends see; a Snapchat Stories clone.
August 4: Facebook tweaks the News Feed to reduce clickbait.
August 9: Facebook blocks ad blockers.
August 11: Facebook’s News Feed is modified to place emphasis on “personally informative” items.
August 26: Facebook Trending becomes fully algorithmically driven.
August 27: Apple changes its Spotlight feature so that articles open in-app, hurting publishers.
September 7: Snapchat axes Local Stories.
September 8: Google releases a study of more than 10,000 mobile domains showing that speed matters for engagement and revenue.
September 12: Twitter announces a live streaming partnership with Cheddar.
September 15: Publishers can sell subscriptions within the Apple News app; Apple keeps 30 percent of subscriptions made through the app, and 15 percent of renewals.
September 15: Improvements are made to call to action button on Instagram ads to make them more visible; with video, though, the destination URL opens first within Instagram with the video continuing to play at the top.
September 20: All Google search results, not just the carousel, now show AMP pages.
September 23: Snapchat announces Spectacles and becomes Snap, Inc.
September 29: Twitter opens Moments to everyone.
September 30: Updates to Google AMP so it better supports a variety of ad sizes.
October 12: Facebook also allows for additional ad formats for publishers in Instant Articles.
October 17: Signal, for newsgathering on Facebook, will include a Live Video column.
October 18: Snapchat switches from a revenue sharing arrangement with publishers on Discover to an up-front licensing arrangement.
October 20: Facebook allows 360 photo and video within Instant Articles.
October 28: Facebook rolls out a voting planner for users where they can view and save the initiatives and candidates they will select.
November 10: Instagram introduces ability to add “see more” links to Instagram Stories.
November 11: After controversy, Facebook will curb ethnic affinity marketing by advertisers focused on, for example, credit or housing, who target users based on whether Facebook has determined they are likely Latino or Asian American, for example.
November 11: Facebook buys CrowdTangle, which is used by publishers for analytics.
November 11: Vertical ads are allowed on Instagram.
November 16: Facebook will work with more third parties to ensure the integrity of their metrics after they miscounted publisher performance.
November 19: In response to post-election pressure, Mark Zuckerberg addresses Facebook’s role in fake news.
November 21: Instagram Stories introduces Live Stories for live video streaming.
November 22: To be allowed into China, Facebook built a censorship tool into its platform.
December 5: Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube partner to address terrorism content online.
December 5: In an effort to combat misinformation, Facebook prompts users to report “misleading language.”
December 5: Google updates its search bar so that there is no longer an autocomplete that reads “are Jews evil.”
December 12: Facebook launches Live 360 video. Users can have a spherical view of live video.
December 14: Facebook begins talks with video producers and TV studios for original content.
December 20: Facebook launches Live Audio. Allows for formats like news radio.
December 22: Business Insider reports that Twitter inadvertently inflated video ad metrics.

2017

January 9: Recode reports that Facebook will allow mid-roll video ads, with 55 percent of revenue going to publishers.
January 11: Facebook announces the Facebook Journalism Project, to work with publishers on product rollouts, storytelling formats, promotion of local news, subscription models, training journalists, and, on the fake news front, collaborating with the News Literacy Project and fact checking organizations. On the same day, TechCrunch reports Facebook agrees to censor content in Thailand at government’s request.
January 11: Instagram Stories will now have ads, and insights are increased, as the platform hits 150 million users.
January 12: Snapchat releases a universal search bar.
January 17: News that Facebook will end Live video deals with publishers in favor of longer more premium video.
January 19: Snapchat will allow ad targeting using third-party data.
January 23: Snapchat updates publisher guidelines: content must be fact checked and cannot be risqué, and will offer some an “age gate” and will require graphic content warnings.
January 24: Instagram makes Live Stories available globally.
January 25: News that Facebook begins testing Stories, like those on Instagram and Snapchat, at the top of the mobile app in Ireland. Facebook also updates Trending to show publisher names, identify trends by number of publishers and not engagement on a single post, and show everyone in a region the same content. In Thailand and Australia, Facebook will have ads like the ones that are in News Feed inside of Messenger.
January 25: Recode reports that more than 200 publishers have been banned from Google’s AdSense network in an effort to combat fake news.
January 26: Facebook’s News Feed algorithm will reward publishers/videos that keep people watching and mid-roll ads won’t play until 90 seconds.
January 26: Twitter’s Explore tab will allow users to see trends, Moments, Live, and search.
January 30: Twitter’s VP of engineering announces an effort to combat harassment.
January 30: Snapchat announces IPO.
January 31: Facebook updates the algorithm to prioritize “authentic” content and will surface posts around real-time/breaking news. Facebook also announces new and expanded partnerships with Nielsen, ComScore, DoubleVerify (for a total of 24 third-party entities) to give better insights into performance of ads.
February 1: Instagram introduces Albums feature in limited release. Widespread release later in the month.
February 2: Snapchat IPO documents show that media partners were paid $58 million, and that Snap-sold ad revenue was 91 percent.
February 6: Google allows for AMP articles URL to indicate the publisher’s name and not just Google.
February 6: News surfaces that a Syrian refugee identified as a terrorist pursues legal action against Facebook on grounds of “fake news.”
February 7: Twitter continues efforts to combat harassment and improve quality, by “stopping the creation of new abusive accounts, bringing forward safer search results, and collapsing potentially abusive or low-quality Tweets.”
February 8: News surfaces that French publishers complain of effort required for anti-fake news partnership with Facebook.
February 10: Facebook further pushes for transparency around ads and says it will allow for a third-party audit.
February 13: The Washington Post joins Snapchat Discover as Discover shifts to allow for breaking news.
February 13: TechCrunch reports that Twitter will reduce its support for ad products that are not drawing advertisers.
February 14: Facebook announces an app for Apple TV and Amazon Fire that will allow people to watch Facebook videos on their TVs.
February 14: Autoplay videos on Facebook will play with sound.
February 14: Google pulls two anti-Semitic sites off its ad platform.
February 16: Mark Zuckerberg writes a nearly 6,000 word manifesto, “Building Global Community,” on the future of Facebook and global civil society.
February 17: Facebook invites media companies to its offices to talk about products to come throughout the year.
February 20: Facebook allows users to send photos and videos from the in-app camera.
February 20: WhatsApp launches Snapchat clone, Status.
February 23: Mid-roll video ads begin on Facebook, following an announcement in January.

#journalisme
#médias_sociaux

How You’re Making Facebook a Money Machine
▻http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/04/30/upshot/how-youre-making-facebook-a-money-machine.html

What you do when waiting for the bus or avoiding work goes a long way to explaining a tectonic shift in business and media.

In such moments you are most likely checking #Facebook. More of you will be doing that than tweeting, searching on #Google, checking stock prices on Yahoo or reading articles like this. And that constant lure, a fix you can easily satisfy both on a phone and a desktop computer, explains why Facebook is pulling ahead of every other large technology company right now.

Your addiction is making Facebook astonishingly profitable. Put a little more kindly, your emotional and intellectual interactions on the social network are creating a great place for companies to advertise.

[...]

Facebook is doing well because it occupies a huge sweet spot in the connected world, perhaps an even bigger one than Google owns.

[...] Both companies get most of their revenue from advertising.

But people apparently hang around on Facebook far longer. According to SimilarWeb, users spent just over 17 minutes on the social network on average in March, well ahead of the nine minutes for Google (these figures don’t accurately reflect how active people are on the sites, but you can still see the difference.)

[...]

Another advantage for Facebook is that its costs are lower than Google’s, which helps it make more money out of every dollar of revenue.

Pundits made a big deal this week about how Facebook excelled as Apple stumbled. But there was a warning for Facebook in Apple’s results. Apple has relied heavily on one product — the iPhone — for much of its revenue, so when sales of the device slowed, there was little Apple could do to keep growing. Facebook is even more reliant on a single element: advertising revenue. If people spend markedly less time on Facebook — because an enticing new network comes along, for example — the company’s revenue growth could slow.

There is no such threat on the horizon. Until one develops, we will be on our phones helping Mark Zuckerberg make even more money.

#publicités #argent #profits

Why I Have Resigned from the Telegraph
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/why-i-have-resigned-from-the-telegraph

The coverage of HSBC in Britain’s Telegraph is a fraud on its readers. If major newspapers allow corporations to influence their content for fear of losing advertising revenue, democracy itself is...

State-owned broadcaster makes TL 800 million from tax in electricity bills
▻http://www.todayszaman.com/business_state-owned-broadcaster-makes-tl-800-million-from-tax-in-elect

Plus de 50% de la propagande télévisée AKP (via la 1ère chaine publique) est financée par les citoyens turcs eux mêmes grâce à une taxe indirecte sur leurs factures d’électricité...

The amount that the state-run Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT) made in 2013 from taxpayers’ electricity bills totaled TL 800 million, which is 54 percent of its total annual revenue, according to a report released by the Court of Accounts on Dec. 31, 2014.

Totaling TL 1.48 billion in 2013, TRT’s revenue for the year was composed of TL 800 million from a TRT tax on electricity bills TL 560 million in fees from the sale of every device containing a radio or television transmitter and TL 110 million in advertising revenue.

Electricity subscribers are charged a tax which goes to TRT which amounts to as much as 2 percent of their electricity bills. In spite of the fact that the institution’s commercial revenues decreased in 2013, its earnings from the electricity tax surged 20.9 percent. While in 2012 the electricity bill tax generated TL 662 million according to the report, the corresponding figure was TL 800 million in 2013. The total expenditure of TRT, meanwhile, totaled TL 1.27 billion in 2013.

Indirect taxation has long been an issue in Turkey, where two-thirds of governmental revenues are levied from citizens via indirect taxes. When it came to the power first in 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government pledged to remove the TRT contribution from electricity bills in order to supply cheap and sustainable electricity to the public. However, since then taxpayers have continued to subsidize TRT.

The state-run TRT has come under sharp criticism for also its favoritism in the coverage of then- Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, particularly since the official start of the presidential election campaign in July 2014. Although the Constitution requires TRT to offer fair coverage to political leaders, Erdoğan appeared on TRT Haber, a subsidiary of TRT, for a total of 559 minutes during the election period. While Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu, the joint presidential candidate of the two leading opposition parties, the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), was given a chance to appear on TRT Haber for 137 minutes, the public broadcaster devoted 18 minutes to the last candidate, the leader of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), Selahattin Demirtaş. Meanwhile, TRT Türk, another subsidiary of TRT, aired five hours and 26 minutes of Erdoğan in three days, with no other candidates being broadcasted at any time on the station during the election period. As a result of this unfair coverage during the election period, TRT was given the highest penalty in its history by the Supreme Election Board (YSK)

#Electricité #Politique #taxation